Similar situation here: Alexander Cherry opens a discussion on Google+ with “So, as far as I can tell, the Old School Revolution is about demanding bad game design. Can anyone give me a counter-example?﻿” How’s that for a terrible opening? Natalie Bennet says in a comment:

Your original statement is so non-sensical that it’s impossible to respond to it.

Clearly people who identify with the “old school revolution” don’t agree that the games that they prefer are “bad game design.” We play those games because they lead to the play experiences we prefer.

So you’re either trolling, stupid, or have a definition of concepts like “bad” and “about” that is incomprehensible to other humans.

[...]

Next time, try something like:

“Features of OSR games like X, Y, and Z thing seem like bad design. They lead to behaviors A, B, and C, which aren’t fun. But some people really like them, there are a lot of games that use them. What’s going on? Why do people want games like this?”

If you start from the assumption that people you don’t understand are basically reasonable, but have different experiences and temperaments than you, talking to them tends to go better.

And yet, at the end of the day, Zak’s doing evil shit? Alexander Cherry ends the thread:

Since Zak’s created a hostile environment in this thread, I’m disabling comments, which I should have done the previous time he did it.

But how did we end up here?

Ralph Mazza starts by defending the position that D&D is poorly designed. If there’s an argument I don’t see it. It basically seems to say that the rules are bad because he can’t use the rules without telling us what it is about the rules that prevents him from doing it.

D&D games aren’t bad design because they encourage free form. D&D games are bad design because D&D was a piss poor game in the first place. It encourages freeform, not because it was designed to encourage free form, but because that’s the only way to get the creaky thing to work at all. This is to be expected from a game that pioneered a whole new thing...the very first automobiles were also piss poor cars. We respect the achievement and put them in museums, but no one is commuting to work today in a horseless carriage.

D&D is a bad design. And OSR games that try to get the desired play experience by emulating a known bad design are thus themselves bad designs. And therefore OSR gamers who demand D&D-esque clones, are essentially demanding bad design.

Tony Tucker and Alexander Cherry then talk about combat with Tony saying:

Also, in OSR games combat is heavily discouraged. There are palpable rewards for avoiding it, and minimal rewards for engaging in it.

Zak comes in, picking up on Ralph’s idea that people need to avoid the rules in order to play the game, and picking up on Tony’s point that avoiding combat is often what the game is about, and writes the following:

Players often have snacks during D&D yet the game does nothing in the rules to encourage snacks. It is therefore poorly designed. When players are snacking they aren’t interacting with the system. Clearly, someone like Ralph should write a storygame which supports snacks so we don’t have to think up our own snacks.

I may have said it differently, but given the opening statements by Alexander Cherry and Ralph Mazza, it seems quite appropriate. And then it all goes downhill.

– Alex Schroeder 2016-08-02 13:04 UTC

People accusing Zak of being a harasser and friends of being his sock puppet accounts and whatnot because of a video game. But look! Coworkers speak out:

Thanks for writing all this up. It can be hard to have a cogent opinion about controversy in the dnd world, especially when there is so much content out there to review. Your post help me make sense of it all and really simplify it for me. I wish more people wrote about this stuff from what seems like a removed perspective.

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